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    Where Is God?: “Man Shall Not See Me and Live” (Exodus 33:20)
    Where Is God?: “Man Shall Not See Me and Live” (Exodus 33:20)
    Where Is God?: “Man Shall Not See Me and Live” (Exodus 33:20)
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    Where Is God?: “Man Shall Not See Me and Live” (Exodus 33:20)

    By William Jannen

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    The monotheist God evolved in the Jewish tradition and was adopted by Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism in turn: unknowable and ineffable. Religious writers have told us for thousands of years that this God is beyond all human comprehension. How can we know if a God is out there? Even if such a God exists, scripture claims that it means death even to look upon him. How, then, can we come to know God?

    Pagan polytheists had no such problem. Their world was full of Gods. They often appeared in human form and interacted with human beings. They could be unpredictable and had to be handled carefully. Monotheism replaced all that with God that is a complete mystery. He cannot be found. He cannot be seen. He cannot be understood by human minds.

    If that is what religion has come to, we may as well face the fact that we are alone in the universe. We shall have to learn to live with that. There s nothing out there.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateFeb 18, 2011
    ISBN9781450280877
    Where Is God?: “Man Shall Not See Me and Live” (Exodus 33:20)
    Author

    William Jannen

    WILLIAM JANNEN has been a lawyer, a teacher, and an investor, but he has studied theology and religion for most of his adult life. At Brooklyn College–CUNY, he taught modern European history. In 1997, he published The Lions of July: A Prelude to War, 1914 with Presidio Press.

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      Book preview

      Where Is God? - William Jannen

      Copyright © 2011 by William Jannen

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.iuniverse.com

      1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      ISBN: 978-1-4502-8086-0 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4502-8088-4 (dj)

      ISBN: 978-1-4502-8087-7 (ebk)

      Printed in the United States of America

      iUniverse rev. date: 02/10/2011

      Contents

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

      Five

      Six

      Endnotes

      One

      Where Is God?

      Prophets, theologians, and religious writers have insisted for thousands of years that God is ineffable, unknowable, and utterly beyond anything we could imagine or experience. In short, when we talk about God, we do not know what we are talking about. People may have what they call transcendent or spiritual experiences and claim that such experiences are God, or at least put them in touch with God, but all major religions agree that it is impossible to describe this transcendence in normal conceptual language.[1] A Roman Catholic New Testament scholar warns, for example, that we must remember that before the mystery of God, all language must eventually fall away, and worship must fall silent to be true.[2] There is a lot to be said for silence with regard to religion. Silence would have saved us all a great deal of trouble.

      But the debate goes on, and people rarely change their minds. Atheists do not become believers; believers do not become atheists. Faced with that impasse, the argument then turns not on whether there is a God or on the truth or untruth of any particular religious doctrine but on whether you personally experience a spiritual dimension that reveals God. God must come to you. It is not at all clear what it means to experience a spiritual dimension, but all religious people insist upon it; without it, you cannot find God. Those who do not experience that spiritual dimension are baffled by what religious believers try to profess.

      The foregoing paragraphs seem to me to summarize the entire history of religious debate. The difficulty has always been that if the traditional tests of historical and scientific verification are abandoned—and everything turns on the individual’s inward experience of the spiritual dimension—then there are no limits to what can be claimed as religious truth or revelation[3] and no agreed-upon method of verifying those claims.

      Perhaps we should consider that the entire God debate is beside the point. What matters, suggests an orthodox rabbi, is trying to make life bearable by offering redemption from the inadequacies of finitude and, mainly, from the flux of temporality.[4] Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun and now an author who focuses on religious topics, writes that she would have been spared a great deal of suffering if her early teachers had told her that in an important sense God was a product of the imagination, like poetry and music.[5] Elaine Pagels, a Protestant professor of religion at Princeton, wonders how being a Christian became belief in doctrine when what attracted her and, presumably, early believers was the comfort they received from a community that shared a spiritual need.[6]

      All of these writers reveal a deeply felt religious sensibility, but they cannot find God! The great monotheistic traditions have all come to regard and to adhere to a set of documents as sacred scripture, and their followers spend enormous effort—literally mountains of paper—to demonstrate that their scripture and not some other is God’s word. Why do we have all these bizarre and wildly unbelievable tales of how God formed the world and delivered the word to particular communities? If God is otherwise remote and unknowable, then figures have to be created who can reveal and speak for God—angels, spirits, prophets, and holy men—together with stories and miracles to establish that these figures speak for God. Without them, God disappears.

      How have the major monotheistic traditions dealt with a God who is never there?

      Two

      The First Monotheists

      The ancient world was full of gods. They came and went freely. They could take human form, interact with people, enjoy sex with them, and impregnate the women. The gods were powerful and could protect people. They could be dangerous if they were angry. It was necessary to placate the gods with temples, sacrifices, and cultic practices to be safe. Many pagan religions told stories of their gods’ mighty deeds and how they had made the world. Life was short, arbitrary, and inexplicable in any event. People needed the stories and the myths to make sense of it all.

      Some four thousand years ago, Hebrew speaking tribes of the Near East began telling stories and legends about how their god had created the world and was the only god they could worship. The Hebrew Bible wastes no time in proclaiming that it contains the word of God. In Genesis, God talks to Abraham at length, establishing a covenant with the Israelites. After Abraham, there are no more face-to-face conversations with God. Moses hears God’s voice from Mount Sinai, where God delivers the Pentateuch in blinding smoke and flame. Moses wants to see God, but God makes it clear that man shall not see me and live (Exodus 33:20).[7] Thereafter, no one sees or talks with God. God speaks to humankind only through heavenly voices, angels, spirits, and, particularly, holy prophets. Every monotheistic religion since then has followed those rules and had to wrestle with the problem of whether it is really God’s voice they are hearing or reading.

      Eventually, the Israelites developed the doctrine that theirs was the only God. Not only was it true that the people of Israel—as they called themselves—could worship no other God, but there was no other God to worship. This took a while. First, their God, Yahweh, had to show he was able to protect them. Since prehistoric times, only power, prosperity, and victory in war could establish a god’s divinity.

      According to the Hebrew Bible, the Israelite God, Yahweh, showed himself to be a powerful warrior God by leading the enslaved Israelites out of Egypt, getting them across the Red Sea by parting it to create a pathway, and destroying the pursuing Egyptian army by letting the water come flooding back. Having successfully freed the Jews, Yahweh demanded, through Moses on Mount Sinai, that the people of Israel worship no other gods before him. If they kept that promise, or covenant, they would be his special people and enjoy his special protection. But if they broke the covenant and turned to other gods, he would destroy them mercilessly. Eventually, Yahweh came to insist there were no other gods, he was the only god, and the Israelites were his chosen people. The worship of other gods was idolatry. That is the backbone myth of the Bible’s Old Testament as it evolved over a period of some four thousand years.[8]

      The gods of all the ancient peoples were expected to protect them from their enemies. A god that could not defeat its people’s enemies would find it difficult to command their loyalty against a stronger, victorious god. There was no particular penalty for following other gods in addition to the tribal or local favorite; you never knew where you might need help. Over the centuries, however, the Israelites came to believe in a different god. Their Yahweh insisted that they worship only him, in good times and bad, and whether their God defeated their enemies or not. That was asking a lot. Moreover, a catastrophe or defeat did not necessarily mean that Yahweh had been defeated by some stronger god; Yahweh might be punishing the Israelites because they had failed to live up to their promise to be loyal and not wander off to other gods in hard times.

      The Jews could be punished terribly by Yahweh, and it was not always easy to distinguish

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